WeeklyWorker

25.07.2024
Jews praying at Western Wall, 1870s

Promise myth as template

An ancient saga is harnessed in service of settler-colonisation. Moshé Machover looks at how modern Zionism not only forged a nation through religion, but finds justification for ethnic cleansing and genocide in the words of Yahweh

On April 29 2019, Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, addressed the Security Council. A video of his performance is available online and is well worth watching.1 His aim was to provide incontestable proof of the Jewish people’s right to possess the entire ‘Land of Israel’.

But, before embarking on his main theme, he put his listeners in a sympathetic frame of mind by mentioning a recent anti-Semitic attack, a shooting in a synagogue in Poway, California, in which a woman was murdered and three persons, including the synagogue’s rabbi, were injured.2 He added that “it is unacceptable that we live in a time in which worshippers must be on guard or look behind their backs while praying, out of fear for being shot”. With this remark we must indeed agree.

In this connection we may recall the massacre at the Ibrahimi Mosque, Hebron, on February 25 1994, during the holy month of Ramadan, when the mosque was packed. On that day, which was also the Jewish holiday of Purim, a religious Zionist settler, Baruch Goldstein, armed with an assault rifle, murdered 29 worshippers, including several children (some about 12 years old) and wounded 125, before being overpowered and beaten to death by the survivors.3 He and his mentor, Meir Kahane, are revered as martyred saints by many religious Zionists, including members of the present Israeli government.4

Danon next turned to his main theme:

The four pillars that prove the case for Jewish ownership of the Land of Israel. The first pillar is the Bible. The Jewish people’s rightful ownership of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, is well documented throughout the Old Testament and beyond … In the book of Genesis, the very first book of the Old Testament, god says to Abraham - and I will read that in Hebrew.

He thereupon donned a kippah, took up a copy of the Hebrew bible and read out verses 7 and 8 of Genesis, chapter 17, spoken by Yahweh, the almighty god. Suspecting that some of the Security Council members may not be conversant with biblical Hebrew, he treated them to an English translation. And then, with an unintentionally comic flourish, he held up the book in his right hand and declared: “This is the deed to our land!”

I watched the video of this speech many times, because I felt that there was something funny about it, in more ways than one. Finally I realised: Danon’s English translation was not quite right. Here are the two verses, as rendered by the King James version:

And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a god unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.

And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their god.

In quoting the translation, Danon stressed the word “all” - “all the land of Canaan” - but omitted the phrase “the land wherein thou art a stranger”.5 This is a crucial omission, because a key point of the biblical promised-land myth is that Abraham is an alien in that land, and so are his Israelite descendants, who eventually invade it under the leadership of Joshua, son of Nun, and displace its indigenous people.

Below I will present a very brief summary of the biblical promised-land narrative, starting with Abraham and ending with Joshua. From a political viewpoint, it does not matter what parts of the myth, if any, are factual. Of course, a great many people believe in its literal veracity, but this belief in itself has little practical significance; it only becomes a lethal ideology when taken as justification and prescription for militant action by messianic Zionists, such as the mass murderer, Baruch Goldstein, and his many admirers. They represent a radical departure from traditional rabbinical doctrine, which dominated Judaism for many centuries. While accepting the biblical narrative as literally true, it warned against instrumentalising it politically: Zionism was condemned as a heresy.6

Paradoxically, a great many seemingly secular Zionists also take the promised-land narrative as a valid warrant for political action - hence the old quip, ‘To be a Zionist, you don’t have to believe that god exists, but you do have to believe that he gave Palestine to the Jews’. Far from being a mere joke, this is a description of a real cognitive dissonance, apparently free of the anxiety normally associated with this condition.

Danon is a case in point: he is not particularly religious, and I doubt very much that he takes the book of Genesis as a factual account of real events from the six days of creation to the death in Egypt of Jacob, Abraham’s grandson. Yet he offers part of this narrative to the world as a “deed”, granting the Jews, supposedly Abraham’s present-day descendants, ownership of other people’s land. Thus the almighty lord Yahweh is seen to have foreshadowed Lord Arthur Balfour, whose notorious letter was, of course, also mentioned by Danon.

This use of the Bible by a secular Zionist is by no means novel. A few days after Danon’s performance, Brant Rosen, an anti-Zionist rabbi, published a scathing article about this bizarre speech, in which he recalls a famous story dating from 1937 about David Ben-Gurion using the Bible in exactly the same way.7 Ideology can evidently play an expedient role, even for those whose belief in it is merely symbolic.

Abram (later renamed Abraham8) son of Terah was a native of Ur, a city in Lower Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). From there Terah and his family migrated towards the land of Canaan, but stopped in Haran (a location in Upper Mesopotamia, believed to be in present-day southern Turkey or northern Syria) and settled there.9 At the age of 75, Abram left his family, his country and his native land behind and, obeying Yahweh’s command, proceeded to the land of Canaan, accompanied by his wife, Sarai (later renamed Sarah10), his nephew, Lot, and their slaves.11

Resident aliens

The indigenous people of Canaan were the Canaanites, along with several related ethnic groups: the Hittites, the Amorites, the Jebusites and others.12 Abraham is referred to as a ‘Hebrew’ (Ivri), which (in the usage of the original text) has the connotation of being a foreigner, a person who has come across.13 He was and remained a stranger, a resident alien in Canaan. Indeed, this is how he described himself. The occasion was a land-purchase deal. Abraham, a nomadic herdsman, needed a piece of land to bury his wife, Sarah, who died in Hebron. He approached the local Canaanite sons of Heth, saying: “I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a burying place with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight.”14 A purchase was made, and Sarah was duly buried in a local cave, where eventually Abraham himself and other members of his family would also be buried. (Over the putative location of this cave there now stands a sacred edifice, the Ibrahimi Mosque, site of the 1994 Purim massacre.)

Like Abraham, his son, Isaac, was also a resident alien in Canaan,15 and so were Isaac’s twin sons, Esau and Jacob.16 The entire family line, down to Jacob’s sons, were itinerant tent-dwelling herdsmen.17

Yahweh’s covenant with Abraham is repeated several times in Genesis and is reiterated to Isaac and Jacob. It is also mentioned many times in other books of the Hebrew Bible. Its first occurrence is quite explicit as to the extent of the promised land - all the land of Canaan:

Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates: [land of] the Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.18

Disdaining intermarriage with the Canaanites “among whom I dwell”, Abraham sent off his major-domo back to his family base back in Mesopotamia - “my country” - to fetch a wife for his son, Isaac. The man returned with Rebekah, Abraham’s great-niece, who duly married Isaac.19 When she gave birth to the twins, Esau emerged first, so he had the birthright of primogeniture; he was also preferred by Isaac, though Rebekah preferred Jacob. Eventually, when they grew up, Esau became a skilful hunter, while Jacob was apparently a “simple man”, but really quite canny. One day, Esau came back famished from the hunt, and Jacob got him to sell his birthright for a pottage of lentils.20 It remained to get Isaac to confirm Jacob’s birthright. Following a cunning stratagem devised and managed by Rebekah, Jacob conned his blind old father into giving him a blessing of primogeniture.21

Hearing that Esau was incensed by this swindle and was plotting to kill Jacob in revenge, Rebekah devised a plan to get her favourite son out of harm’s way: let him flee to the family’s homeland and take refuge for “a few days” with her brother, Laban, in Haran. This would also work as a marriage arrangement - which is how she sold it to Isaac. She told him that she had a thing against local girls - the very idea that Jacob would marry one of them made her want to die.22 Isaac thereupon charged Jacob not to marry a Canaanite girl, but to go to Mesopotamia and marry one of Laban’s daughters.23

Rather than a few days, Jacob spent 20 years in Haran working for Laban, an exploitative trickster. Meantime he raised a family: besides his two wives, Laban’s daughters, Leah and Rachel, he had two concubines, his wives’ respective slave women. He fathered 11 sons and a daughter. Eventually, Jacob managed to outwit his uncle and ended up exceedingly rich, owning much livestock as well as female and male slaves.24

On his way back to Canaan, Jacob was assaulted one night by a mysterious stranger, with whom he wrestled until daybreak. Jacob prevailed, although he suffered a dislocated hip. It transpired that the stranger was a god, who on parting blessed Jacob and renamed him ‘Israel’, which means ‘He who contends with god’.25 Henceforth his descendants are called ‘children of Israel’ or ‘Israelites’.

Egypt, 400 years

Joseph, Jacob’s 11th son and his favourite, aroused his elder brothers’ envy. Visiting them in the field where they were looking after the family flock, he was seized by them and sold for 20 pieces of silver to passing Egypt-bound traders. As a cover-up story, the brothers led Jacob to believe that Joseph had been devoured by a wild beast.

The traders sold Joseph on to Pharaoh’s captain of the guard. Following several changes of fortune, the 17-year-old Hebrew slave ended up at the age of 30 as Pharaoh’s viceroy. He was eventually reunited with his father and brothers, who, driven by a famine in Canaan, went down to Egypt to obtain food.26 Pharaoh welcomed them to stay and look after his cattle.27

As foretold to Abraham,28 the Israelites spent 400 years in Egypt, where they were referred to as ‘Hebrews’. The initial welcome did not last long. A new king, alarmed by the rate at which they increased, and suspecting them of potential disloyalty, enslaved them and put them to work for the state. He further decreed that all newborn Hebrew males are to be killed - a decree that the Hebrew midwives contrived to evade.29 One Hebrew baby boy, hidden by his mother in a basket among the reeds on the bank of the Nile, was found by Pharaoh’s daughter who had come down to bathe in the river. She took pity on the crying baby and decided to adopt him. The boy’s sister, who had hidden nearby, arranged for his real mother to be hired as his nurse. The princess named her adopted son ‘Moses’.30

Eventually, Moses, an Egyptian royal by adoption, was appointed by Yahweh to bring forth the Israelites out of Egypt31 and lead them towards the Land of Canaan - the promised land where their forefathers had long, long since resided as foreigners.32

Egypt to Canaan

We resume the narrative at the point when, following their miraculous escape from Egypt, the Israelites embark on their 40-year trek in the wilderness.33 Yahweh, addressing them through Moses, makes it clear that redeeming the promise made to Abraham will involve major, albeit gradual, removal of the indigenous people:

My angel will go ahead of you and bring you into the land of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites and Jebusites, and I will wipe them out. Do not bow down before their gods, worship them or follow their practices. You must demolish them and break their sacred stones to pieces …

I will send my terror ahead of you and throw into confusion every nation you encounter. I will make all your enemies turn their backs and run. I will send the hornet ahead of you to drive the Hivites, Canaanites and Hittites out of your way. But I will not drive them out in a single year, because the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you. Little by little I will drive them out before you, until you have increased enough to take possession of the land.

I will establish your borders from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the desert to the Euphrates River. I will give into your hands the people who live in the land, and you will drive them out before you. Do not make a covenant with them or with their gods. Do not let them live in your land or they will cause you to sin against me, because the worship of their gods will certainly be a snare to you.34

In the passage just quoted, clearance of the natives appears as an act of god, with the Israelites as almost passive beneficiaries. Other passages call upon the latter actively to take matters into their own hands:

When you cross the Jordan into Canaan, drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you. Destroy all their carved images and their cast idols, and demolish all their high places. Take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given you the land to possess …

But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land, those you allow to remain will become barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides. They will give you trouble in the land where you will live. And then I will do to you what I plan to do to them.35

An even more explicit exhortation:

When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labour and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When Yahweh your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder Yahweh your God gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.

However, in the cities of the nations Yahweh your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them - the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites - as Yahweh your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshipping their gods, and you will sin against Yahweh your God.36

According to the accounts in the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy, the Israelites, still led by Moses, began to implement these measures before crossing the Jordan.37 Subsequently, Moses, whom Yahweh denied access to the west side of the river, died in Moab, having passed the reins to his servant, Joshua, son of Nun.38

In the Torah (Pentateuch), the theme of the divine promise to Abraham, the ordained displacement and extermination of the indigenous peoples of Canaan by his Israelite descendants is always in the background. However, explicit references to it occur only sporadically as brief passages, integrated in the narrative flow. But this theme is dominant in the book of Joshua: it is what its first 12 chapters are all about. The remaining 12 chapters deal with the allocation of the conquered land to the Israelite tribes.

The following are highlights of Joshua’s conquests.

On and on it goes: Lachish, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, Hazor, Madon, Shimron, Akshaf … all completely destroyed, not sparing anyone that breathed.43

Converse presentism

What are we to make of this saga? It would be absurd to condemn and junk it on the grounds that it violates our present-day attitude of anti-colonialism, norms of human rights and conventions against war crimes and genocide. This would be a presentist, anti-historicist fallacy. To be consistent, along with big chunks of the Bible we would have to jettison other major ancient contributions of diverse cultures to our common human heritage. The Iliad, for one, would have to go. Fortunately, as far as I know, there is no serious advocacy of such presentism and little danger of it prevailing.

The real and actual menace is posed by a converse of presentism, its mirror image: taking the biblical myth as a template for today, and its norms as guides for present action. This menace has been potential in Zionist ideology from its very beginning. Here I would like to recapitulate part of an analysis I made in a review article written more than a decade ago:44

Zionism modelled itself on 19th-century eastern- and central-European nationalisms: it regarded itself as the nationalism of the Jews. The ideological project of any nationalism is to invent, as it were, the nation for which it claims to speak: to provide it with a narrative of common origin, homeland and destiny. This is then used to claim possession of, and sovereignty over, the homeland.

In one crucial sense, Zionism had to be more inventive than any of its European models. Each of the latter had a ready-made objective raw material: a community inhabiting a roughly discernible contiguous territory, speaking a more-or-less distinct vernacular (in many cases also using a highbrow version of it as a secular literary language), and sharing a distinctive secular culture. The project of nationalism was to unify this inchoate nation-in-itself (an sich) and forge it into a nation-for-itself (für sich). This was, at least in principle, a secular project: a modern nation need not share a common religion. Since the American and French Revolutions, modernity regarded religion as a private matter, whereas the nation - and hence nationalism - are nothing if not public and collective.

But the only thing that all Jewish communities had in common was, precisely, their religion: Judaism. They were scattered across the world and shared no common vernacular or secular culture. So if (as claimed by Benedict Anderson) all nations are imagined communities, the non-existence of a pan-Jewish nation-in-itself meant that Zionists had to perform an exceptionally prodigious leap of imagination: inventing a nation that one joins by religious conversion and leaves by apostasy.

However, once this extraordinary feat of positing worldwide Jewry as a single nation had been performed, the ideological task of constructing for it a narrative of common origin, homeland and destiny was easier than for Zionism’s European nationalist models: a ready-made ancient, sacred narrative of history and eschatology offered itself. Jews already ‘knew’ that they were all direct descendants of the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who was renamed ‘Israel’. Thus they were all ‘literally’ Bnei Yisrael (Sons of Israel). Their god-promised and god-given homeland was Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel), covering a huge area “from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates”.

All that remained for Zionist ideology to do was to secularise this sacred narrative. The eschatological bit, the ‘return’ to Zion, was converted into a political colonising project - hence its very name: ‘Zionism’ - with the impressively bearded Theodor Herzl as secular messiah or his herald.

The seminal role of the Bible in Zionist ideology is widely recognised by historians. Thus, in a recent historical study, Itzhak Conforti notes that the Bible served as an early ideological bridge and common ground, uniting the various strands of Zionism: the superficially secular and the traditional-religious:

In the modern nationalist era, the Zionist thinkers gave the ancient biblical text national sanctity, which stemmed from its traditional religious holiness. The fact that biblical interpretation provoked internal debates among the various streams of the Zionist movement … reveals the shared importance of the Bible for all shades of Zionism … [T]he biblical text became a unifying cultural element that bridged the gaps between secular, religious and traditional Jews … The Bible served not only as a foundational text for the Zionist movement, but also as a proof text which justified the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. Hence, in the first two decades of the State of Israel, the Bible continued to play a central role in Israeli education and culture.45

Conforti’s study does not go beyond Israel’s early years, but in fact the role of the Bible in Israeli education and culture continued to grow in later years.

David Ben-Gurion’s use of the Bible, to which I have alluded before, is of obvious significance. Conforti notes:

National leader David Ben Gurion adopted national and universalist values from the Bible. But, during the early years of the state, his main interest in the Bible was focused on concrete historical issues, such as conquering the land, settlement, the kingdoms of David and Solomon, and the return to Zion during the reigns of Cyrus and Darius. These became the main subjects of discussion in the Bible study group he hosted in the prime minister’s residence.

Despite Ben Gurion’s secular approach, he did not challenge the historical truth of the Bible. On the contrary, he thought that the Bible was a faithful reflection of the story of ancient Israel.46

This approach was also shared by leading Israeli academic biblical scholar, Yehezkel Kaufman, who “interpreted the Book of Joshua as a realistic historical book that correctly describes the conquest of the land and the settlement”.47

The foundational function of the Bible in Zionist ideology facilitates its converse-presentist reading, as if it were a contemporary document, whose moral values and attitudes to war and conquest may be applicable today. A reverential attitude to the Bible pervades Israel’s entire Jewish educational system, where it takes up a major part of the curriculum, even in secular schools.

Of course, this does not mean that every Jewish Israeli becomes a supporter, let alone an active advocate, of ethnic cleansing and other war crimes. Even among Zionists, there are many who recoil at such acts. But objectively the Zionist colonisation project has an inbuilt disposition to ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs.48

So those who actively pursue this project can find handy support, inspiration and justification in the converse-presentist reading of the biblical myth, which is part of the dominant ideology of their society. Incitement to genocide and other war crimes may escape with impunity by phrasing it as biblical exegesis.

Can the Jewish state prosecute a Jew, let alone a rabbi, for preaching the word of god?

  1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZenZ3YAvzEk.↩︎

  2. See Wikipedia, ‘Poway synagogue shooting’: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poway_synagogue_shooting.↩︎

  3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacre.↩︎

  4. See, for example, ‘Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of chaos’ The New Yorker February 27 2023 (archive.ph/Rvwl9); ‘Video shows Ben-Gvir giving speech with words praising extremist Meir Kahane in background’ Ha’aretz May 2 2023 (www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-05-02/ty-article/.premium/video-shows-ben-gvir-giving-speech-with-words-praising-extremist-meir-kahane-in-background/00000187-dd31-dea8-af97-dfb1cbaf0000).↩︎

  5. The original text says “eretz megurékha”, which in biblical Hebrew means the land in which you are a ger (ie, a resident stranger).↩︎

  6. See my discussion of the neoteric theology of religious Zionism in ‘Israel and the Messiah’s ass’ Weekly Worker June 1 2017: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1157/israel-and-the-messiahs-ass.↩︎

  7. Rabbi Brant Rosen, ‘When secular Israelis claim “God gave this land to us”’ People’s World May 29 2019: www.peoplesworld.org/article/when-secular-israelis-claim-god-gave-this-land-to-us. Rosen does not mention the revealing elision in Danon’s translation of the Genesis text.↩︎

  8. Genesis 17:5↩︎

  9. Genesis. 11.↩︎

  10. Genesis 17:15.↩︎

  11. Genesis 12.↩︎

  12. Genesis 15:19-21. For the genealogical relations between these groups see Genesis 10:15-16.↩︎

  13. Genesis 14:13. For the etymology of the biblical term, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrews.↩︎

  14. Genesis 23:4.↩︎

  15. Genesis 26:3.↩︎

  16. Genesis 28:4, 36:6.↩︎

  17. Genesis 13-47 passim. Tent-dwelling mentioned some 20 times. Occupation as herdsmen: see in particular Genesis 46:34, 47:3.↩︎

  18. Genesis 15:18-21 (trans. KJV).↩︎

  19. Genesis 24.↩︎

  20. Genesis 25.↩︎

  21. Genesis 27.↩︎

  22. Ibid.↩︎

  23. Genesis 28.↩︎

  24. Genesis 29-30. Only Jacob’s 12th son, Benjamin, was born in Canaan (Genesis 35:16-18).↩︎

  25. Genesis 32:23-30. The enigmatic account of this episode does not specify whether this was the god of Abraham or some other god, possibly one of those alluded to in the previous chapter, such as the god of Nahor (Abraham’s brother and Laban’s grandfather). All English translations of Genesis 31:53 that I have consulted make it appear that the god of Nahor and the god of Abraham are one and the same; but this is a monotheistic massaging of the original text.↩︎

  26. Genesis 37, 39-50. The story of Joseph is a literary gem that can be read as a stand-alone novelette. An intermezzo (Genesis 38), inserted at a tense juncture, is an unrelated story of the sexual misadventures of Judah, Jacob’s third son.↩︎

  27. Genesis 47:5-6.↩︎

  28. Genesis 15:13.↩︎

  29. Exodus 1.↩︎

  30. Exodus 2.↩︎

  31. Exodus 3:10.↩︎

  32. Exodus 6:4.↩︎

  33. Numbers 14:33, Deuteronomy 8:2. A modern reconstruction of their route is shown in the Hebrew Wikipedia map: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Exodus_map_Hebrew.jpg.↩︎

  34. Exodus 23:23-33. Here and in the translated quotes that follow, I rely on the KJV and the New International Version, but I have replaced the euphemism, ‘the Lord’, by his name, as in the original text.↩︎

  35. Numbers 33:51-56.↩︎

  36. Deuteronomy 20:10-18.↩︎

  37. See accounts of the destruction of the Amorite land of King Sihon and the Bashan land of King Og in Numbers 21, recapitulated in Deuteronomy 2-3.↩︎

  38. Deuteronomy 37.↩︎

  39. Joshua 6:21.↩︎

  40. Joshua 8:24-26.↩︎

  41. Joshua 10:28.↩︎

  42. Joshua 10:30.↩︎

  43. Joshua 10-11.↩︎

  44. Review of The invention of the Jewish people by Shlomo Sand, Race and Class January 2011 (reprinted as chapter 32 in my book Israelis and Palestinians: conflict and resolution Chicago, 2012).↩︎

  45. Y Conforti, ‘Zionism and the Hebrew Bible: from religious holiness to national sanctity’ Middle East Studies Vol 60, issue 3, pp483-94 (www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00263206.2023.2204516).↩︎

  46. Ibid.↩︎

  47. Ibid.↩︎

  48. See chapter 33 of my book Israelis and Palestinians (op cit). This chapter, under the same name as the book, is online: www.matzpen.org/docs/IsraelisPalestiniansConflictResolution-Machover.pdf. See also my article, ‘The decolonisation of Palestine’ Weekly Worker June 23 2016: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1112/the-decolonisation-of-palestine.↩︎